Blizzard vows to crack down on bad Twitch chat behavior

If you've been in a Twitch chat recently then you know how they can be one of the greatest experiences or a wretched hive of scum and villainy. You also know that once it reaches a certain group size the amount of kind and polite people to the number of vile people starts to take a nose dive. If you watched the Hearthstone event at DreamHack Austin on twitch then you may know about the racist comments that began to fill the chat surrounding Terrence Miller, the man that finished second.

As a result Blizzard is vowing to tackle the issue. Mike Morhaime, Blizzard CEO, released a statement saying:

"We’re extremely disappointed by the hateful, offensive language used by some of the online viewers during the DreamHack Austin event the weekend before last. One of our company values is “Play Nice; Play Fair”; we feel there’s no place for racism, sexism, harassment, or other discriminatory behavior, in or outside of the gaming community. This is obviously a larger, societal problem that affects us on many levels. We can only hope that when instances like this come to light it encourages people to be more thoughtful and positive, and to fully reject mean-spirited commentary, whether within themselves or from their fellow gamers.

To help combat this type of behavior during live events, we’ve reached out to players, streamers, and moderators, along with partners like Twitch, DreamHack, and others, to get consensus and collaborate on what to do differently moving forward. To that end, we’re investigating a pilot program that Twitch has in the works to streamline moderation and combat ban evasion. We’re also updating our e-sports tournament partner policies with a stronger system of checks, balances, and repercussions to provide a better chat experience around our content.

We believe these are important steps to take to help address the related issues, but we acknowledge that they only address part of the problem. This is ultimately an industry-wide issue, and it will take all of us to make a real impact."

This isn't the first time that Twitch has been used to harass streamers or guests. And given how awful people can be on internet it is not likely to be the last, but at the very least Blizzard and Twitch are taking steps to correct this situation caused by a very vocal minority of horrible people.

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